When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different

aspects of the phenomenon. [10] These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings
of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.
[11]
 Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers
such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias
argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and
that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is
possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to,
language.[12]
During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate
about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Herder argued that language had
originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and
poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such
as Kant and Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to
wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world – asking whether
language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that it in
turn impose on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether
philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that
language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of
philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic
turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about
language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today. [13]

Mental faculty, organ or instinct

One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake
linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition
stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the
human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view
that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that
all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire
language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments
where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole
languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This
view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to
be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or American
philosopher Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in
studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.[14][15]

Formal symbolic system